Thursday, 15 December 2011

A year in words

A custom word-cloud we've made from key news events of the year (click to view larger)

The top 10 words and phrases of 2011 include ‘occupy’, ‘Arab Spring’ and ‘Steve Jobs’, although given the industry we’re in, we can only claim to have links with the latter. Not quite in the same intellectual vein - given that Charlie Sheen comes in at number four - we’ve also looked at Facebook’s top 10 global topics. However, it is quite an interesting mix of the historic and the banal, ‘military operations begin in Libya’ versus ‘Call of Duty” being a case in point.

Facebook - top 10 global topics (click to view larger)

To find out what words would be in our top 10 over the year we created word clouds from our e-news stories and blogs throughout the year, with ‘Society’, ‘print’ ‘website’, ‘new’, ‘business’, ‘digital’ and ‘brand’ coming out on top. This links in very nicely when we look back at the projects we’ve worked on over the last year, as there has been an interesting mix of digital and print based work.

a custom word cloud from all of our 2011 blog posts (click to view larger)

Our digital services have definitely grown this year, and we’ve designed and created a number of websites for clients including e-Front (naming and producing new site Pevara), Montagu and CLS. However, the branding side of the business has remained strong, and we’ve created new identities for Clip and Ping, Optalis and The Physiological Society, amongst others. We’ve also become very much involved in the science sector, working with EPSRC, BBSRC, Bloodhound and The Technology Partnership as well as Optalis and The Physiological Society as above.

Property projects have also been successful for us this year, having worked with Carillion Richardson on the branding for St Martin’s Quarter in Worcester as well as Palazzo Dorottya in Budapest. The internal office graphics at CBRE’s headquarters also provided us with a fantastic opportunity to expand our expertise in experimental branding with the iColour tiles piece.

It's all doom and gloom for 2012 according to the news, however, it’s not all bad news here at TTP. Yes of course, the continuing difficult economy has had an impact and we have seen repeat work from old clients taper off as the downturn continues, but what is refreshing is that we’ve gained a number of new clients, either those coming to us direct or from introductions or recommendations, which shows we’re doing something right!

We have plenty of prospects for 2012 bubbling under and we’re looking forward to working on a number of projects, both digital and print, with new clients including Yahoo in Switzerland, YahSat in Abu Dhabi, Informa and PIE in London (and no, it’s not the apple variety).

Merry Christmas and wishing you a happy and successful New Year from all of us at tothepoint.